


the small hours

by traveller



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-01-12
Updated: 2004-01-12
Packaged: 2017-10-22 21:38:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/242846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/traveller/pseuds/traveller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>The clock is ticking, shockingly loud, a counterpoint to his own pounding heartbeat while awareness slowly returns. He can't open his eyes, not yet, he hasn't pushed the nightmare far enough away to be able face the dark.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	the small hours

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mrkinch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrkinch/gifts).



The clock is ticking, shockingly loud, a counterpoint to his own pounding heartbeat while awareness slowly returns. He can't open his eyes, not yet, he hasn't pushed the nightmare far enough away to be able face the dark.

A familiar dream, a familiar terror: numbness, creeping first down his arms to his hands, so that everything he tried to hold slipped from his fingers. Then creeping further, slithering down his spine, the cold deadness spreading like bacteria.

He squeezes his eyes tightly closed, not yet, not yet. His hands flex into fists, good, good, and then he sucks in his stomach, okay, okay, tensing and releasing each muscle all the way to his toes, which he wiggles until they poke free from the covers.

All right.

He opens his eyes. He can move. He can move.

*

He remembers waking to the overwhelming urge to make some kind of tacky Humpty Dumpty joke, something to shock everyone out of their white-faced weeping, their white-knuckled clinging. He got as far as "and all the King's men" before his mother snapped her jaws like gardening shears and said, "That's horrid, Orlando. That's not funny."

But he alone had the right, didn't he? _He_ was the one reduced to bits of shattered eggshell, after all. So what if he'd bent his sense of humour to match his brokenness? Honestly now, who could blame him?

He remembers thinking that pain like this couldn't possibly exist in the world, that hurting so much was simply impossible. Surely it couldn't go on, any moment he'd wink out of existence, because a world where a body could hurt like this and _still live_ was a world of unfathomable cruelty, was a world utterly abandoned by God. If indeed God had ever been about, which was doubtful.

But he remembers wishing he knew how to pray. He'd been brought up swaddled in a warm blanket of agnosticism, que sera and all that, with a don't ask, don't tell policy toward deities. This kind of pain, though, this kind of anger, surely there was someone or something with which he could lodge a complaint and find redress.

And always he remembers the small hours of the morning, when the nurses were off seeing to their paperwork, when his mum was off trying to get some sleep, when he was completely alone with nothing but the fear and the dark closing in.

*

Sean never asks, never presses, just accepts the fact that it's always three am when Orlando shows up. The sound of Orli ratcheting the truck's gears into park always wakes him, warns him, before the tap tap tapping comes at his window. Orli hoists himself over the sill without waiting for an answer; he tumbles into Sean's bed, shivering, sometimes still in bare feet and pyjamas.

Sean tsks, gathers him in, and Orli's mouth is already open, pressing trembling hot kisses to Sean's shoulder, his neck. He lets Orli flip on all the lights and climb all over him, licking and touching and stroking and sucking, a compact tornado of sensation. Orli whispers nursery rhymes and nonsense, wriggles and rubs, brings Sean right up to the edge before he's ready, before he twists around under Sean and says, "Okay, okay, move."

So Sean fucks him slowly, carefully, lets Orli's tossing head and choking whimpers guide him, hopes he's giving as much as he's taking. He doesn't ask why, but when the sun comes up, when they are warm and sated and curving together, toes wiggling and poking out from under the blankets, that's the only time Orli closes his eyes.


End file.
